A growing interest in JPL's Solar Gravitational Lens mission here takes Wes Kelly on an odyssey into the past. A long-time Centauri Dreams contributor, Wes looks at the discovery of gravitational lensing, which takes us back not only to Einstein but to a putative...
We need to get to the ice giants. We have limited enough experience with our system’s larger gas giants, although orbital operations at both Jupiter and Saturn have been highly successful. But about the ice giants, their formation, their interiors, their moons (and...
Over the past several years we’ve looked at two missions that are being designed to go beyond the heliosphere, much farther than the two Voyagers that are our only operational spacecraft in what we can call the Local Interstellar Medium. Actually, we can be more...
1000 AU makes a fine target for our next push past the heliosphere, keeping in mind that good science is to be had all along the way. Thus if we took 100 years to get to 1000 AU (and at Voyager speeds it would be a lot longer than that), we would still be gathering...
When scientists began seriously looking at beaming concepts for interstellar missions, sails were the primary focus. The obvious advantage was that a large sail need carry no propellant. Here I'm thinking about the early work on laser beaming by Robert Forward, and...
My last look at laser communications inside the NASA playbook was a year ago, and for a variety of reasons it's time to catch up with the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in late 2021, and the projects that will follow. LCRD has now been...
Adam Crowl has been appearing on Centauri Dreams for almost as long as the site has been in existence, a welcome addition given his polymathic interests and ability to cut to the heart of any issue. His long-term interest in interstellar propulsion has recently been...
The last time we looked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s ongoing efforts toward designing a mission to the Sun’s gravitational lens region beyond 550 AU, I focused on how such a mission would construct the image of a distant exoplanet. Gravitational lensing takes...
We’ve talked about the ongoing work at the Jet Propulsion Society on the Sun’s gravitational focus at some length, most recently in JPL Work on a Gravitational Lensing Mission, where I looked at Slava Turyshev and team’s Phase II report to the NASA Innovative Advanced...
Epsilon Eridani has always intrigued me because in astronomical terms, it's not all that far from the Sun. I can remember as a kid noting which stars were closest to us - the Centauri trio, Tau Ceti and Barnard's Star - wondering which of these would be the first to...